Voyeurism And The Anti-Ontology Of Cache Analysis

Right In Plain View: Voyeurism and the Anti-ontology of Cache Privacy in the modern world is becoming a commodity that is increasingly difficult to come by. It seems as if every day there is a news story about a massive breach of private data, or of some invasive new screening method being introduced in airports. The Internet has also enabled people to broadcast their information out into the world, with many people allowing others to look into their existence through social media in an oddly exhibitionistic fashion. The only place where one can expect true privacy is in the home. It is a place where one can feel secure knowing they are in an environment that they have constructed. What happens, then, when this space is violated, and

As the credits roll, the audience is treated to a rather boring shot of the exterior of an apartment building. People come and go, cars drive by, nothing of note is going on. The audience then hears voice over, a man and a woman talking, with the sound coming from the tape still prevalent as well. The two voices are discussing the location of something, followed by the sound of someone walking down a flight of stairs, with the woman asking after him. There is then a cut to Georges walking outside to where his wife Anne found the tape. It is clearly a different time of day, late evening perhaps. This scene establishes the means by which the film will transition from tape to “reality”, and that is with almost no transition at all. The onus is on the audience to pay attention and discern when the film switches from the surveillance tapes to what is happening in the moment. It also sets the tone of the tapes themselves. In discussing this scene in the film journal “Wide Screen”, Kartik Nair writes: “ Nonetheless, the tape is a vigorously encroaching form in its brazen looking, all the more vexing for issuing from an invisible apparatus.” (Nair) While the content of the tape itself is innocuous, it is the fact that they are being watched at all that concerns Georges. The irony here comes from the fact that he is, in fact, a television

At the end of it all, the questions of the film’s plot are unimportant. The most important question the film asks the audience is “Why did you want to watch that?” A man lies dead in a pool of his own blood, a son no longer has a father, a man’s marriage is falling apart and the audience, much like Georges, is still only interested in finding out who it was that made those tapes. The things happening around this plot point are almost like sideshow spectacles, distracting the viewer from the main event. In their search for the scopohilic, however, the audience misses the minutiae of the events surrounding them, consuming in a sort of blind frenzy. The film goes to great lengths show this to the audience, to try and get them to take a step back and critically examine why they want to watch events unfold, but the audience cannot see this, for they are too caught up in discovering who the culprit is, when it was them all along. The answer was hidden right in plain